


combinatorics

by potted_music



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, M/M, anal fingering as a way of coping with grief, casual adultery, drinking like it's going out of style, questionable Soviet menstrual hygiene products
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 00:15:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19161901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: An assortment of half-baked drabbles set in the same 'verse, featuring Boris, Valera and Ulana in various combinations.Warning: these are most definitely not proper fics (cue a lot of ~fast-forwarding~ and ~handwaving of plot points~ and authorial voice when you least need it), but there's approximately 0 chance I'll do something about that, so I'm sticking them here for safekeeping as is.





	1. the one with the awkward sex and horrible menstrual hygiene products

They sleep together almost by accident. He’s drunk, she’s drunk, she assumes they will be dead within five years, she called her husband earlier that day and he asked what he should get his mother for her birthday without once asking if Ulana was safe, if she was happy (she isn’t safe, but she feels electrified, more alive than she’s been in years). Hence, Valery’s dingy hotel room, and after some ineffectual poking, she has to reach down and guide his cock in. He thrusts once, twice, then stills with a drunken whimper. To call that good sex would be the biggest overstatement since the party declared the Chernobyl disaster contained and under control. She wonders with a hysteric laugh if this is what she was put on this here earth to do: you know, some people are born to cure cancer, some to write poetry that will move people to tears across centuries, and she? she’s here to rid scientists of an unlikely age of their virginity: that’s her absentminded but not unkind husband, that’s her lab assistant who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his parents and a twice-divorced sister with her twins, that’s this man who slides awkwardly off her now.

(Valera’s not a virgin, he’s just somewhere higher up on the Kinsey scale, unless very drunk and suddenly aware of his own mortality, but she doesn’t know that yet: that’s the theme for another drunk midnight conversation.)

“So where exactly is a clitoris,” he says, putting the stress on the second syllable. She expects him to perfunctorily rub at it -are-we-there-yet?- and call it a night, but to her surprise, he dives down and firmly moves her thighs apart. Turns out he has a talented mouth in more ways than one.

*

Fast forward. She’s visiting him in Moscow to discuss preparations for the trial. They don’t sleep together again, but there’s a certain grateful warmth lingering after an awkwardness shared. In the morning, she greets him with, “Could you buy some cotton and bandages?”

He bats away her hand with crumpled money. He cannot stand the sight of blood, not really, but he’s supposed to Deal With Stuff, so he valiantly goes, "Are you hurt? Can I help?“

"It’s my period.”

He’s flabbergasted.

“Aren’t women supposed to- Aren’t you too-”

She throws her head back and laughs.

“Too old? Cannot wait. Now, bandages and cotton. I’ve bled through my skirt, you cannot expect me to walk around the city like that.”

He hands her his pajama pants and dashes out. The first two pharmacies don’t have cotton, the third doesn’t have bandages (good thing he bought them earlier) but has a long line. To make up for the wait, he drops by a department store and buys her extra panties. You know, the type of panties he saw his grandma wear, so they are forever associated with safety and comfort of home for him.

(For her, they are forever associated with Things That Should Be Burned with Fire.)

“Give me your skirt.”

Queasy but protective, he rinses her skirt in that green-and-white enamel bowl everybody had; if you are from the region, you know exactly what I mean; if you are not from the region, just assume that this image of a universal thing everybody has, utilitarian and trustworthy if not beautiful, confronted with the particulars (fingers in cold water lightly clouded with blood, holding up the skirt to the light to make sure that the spot is gone) exudes peak air of melancholy at small kindnesses against the interchangeability of human lives in an inhumane system. Or something.


	2. the one with the kinsey scale conversation set between the two parts of ch1

Midnight, her, and a bottle of vodka should stop meeting with that sort of depressing regularity. She can almost hear her mother tsk in her head and say, “But you are a girl, Ulianochka. Act like one.” Well, her mother never had to track the progression of a dig under the melting core of a nuclear reactor, all the while worrying that her eldest might flunk out of school and end up in the army – end up _here_ – while her husband, when asked to intervene, just shakes his head and says, “boys will be boys,” now had she? So, midnight, her, a bottle of vodka, and an equally drunk Legasov it is, and the bottle is empty well before pleasant indifference sets in.

“Wait,” Legasov says, and drunkenly stumbles to his bed stand. “I have another one somewhere-“ – indistinct rattling, essentials spilling to the floor, – “right here.”

He raises the bottle triumphantly in the air. It’s a moving testament to how drunk she is that she slurs,

“I might have kissed you, but I feel like I’ve already done my part taking your virtue.”

He barely spills a drop topping up her glass, then looks up sharply.

“What virtue?”

“I’ve spoiled you,” she coos. “Nobody will marry you now.”

He eyes his glass, then, thinking better of it, takes a swig from the bottle and rubs his lips with the back of his hand.

“I’m fifty, for God’s sake. What gave you that ridiculous idea?”

“But you were so-“ she waves a hand in the air, encompassing everything, at least in her mind.

“I’ll have you know that I’ve never heard a complaint,” he says indignantly, but not without a humorous twinkle in his eyes.

She kicks at his leg, misses, bends over with laughter, and giggles till she weeps.

“Those poor women,” she says, wiping at her eyes. “Hope you give them extra nice bottles of cognac for March 8.”

He fidgets, says nothing, hooks his finger in his tie to pull it looser, and then it dawns on her. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have seen it. Her sister is an actress, she hangs out in those circles, she knows those people, she should have thought of it sooner.

“Was I your first _woman_ though.”

Deer in the headlight look tells her everything she needs to know. Legasov decisively screws the vodka bottle shut and gets up.

“Right. I think we’ve all had enough.”

Excellent, just excellent. Europe might still become an uninhabitable wasteland, her son might still become a statistic of Chernobyl casualties – the number she will definitely join – and also, she has just hurt the one good man in this circus. She stands up clumsily and clasps his hand in a gesture she hopes looks like a heartfelt expression of sincere regret rather than a last-ditch attempt to stay upright. Before he has time to say anything, she blurts out,

“I can guarantee you I won’t remember the first thing about this conversation come morning. This secret dies with me. Besides, you’ve seen how my boobs sag, and I’m sure you could call my husband and tell him everything about the other night. We can hold each other hostages, or we can be friends.”

She reaches out her other hand for a handshake, and after a moment, he takes it. Friends then. Relieved, she sits back down, then looks up at him.

“Serious question though.” He stills, but she continues with a laugh, “Joe Dassin or Charles Aznavour? You know, if you had a chance.”

For a moment, he looks indignant, then says, “Charles Aznavour.”

“You, my friend, have horrible taste.”

[Mironov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Mironov_\(actor\)) or [Nikulin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Nikulin)? Nikulin (him), Mironov (her).

“Gorbachev or Shcherbina,” she says, and you have to appreciate how drunk she is, how stupid.

He chokes on his vodka. “Why. How is it even a question.“

"Come on. I’d choose Shcherbina.”

“Shcherbina,” he agrees dourly.

“See? At least we can agree on something.”

“What’s this racket?” Shcherbina asks, entering the room. Speak of the devil.

She waves an empty bottle of vodka at him.

“Go away, Boris Evdokimovich, we are having a heart-to-heart here.”

Shcherbina doesn’t spare her a glance though, his eyes trained on Legasov.

“Valera, are you alright?”

Legasov is still flustered from their conversation, drunk flush blotchy on his cheeks.

“I think Comrade Legasov has had enough,” Shcherbina says with finality. “Youth these days. Do I need to tuck everybody in to make sure that you are all functional come morning?”

Valera doesn’t look up at him at first, and when he does, there’s a vulnerable smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

Oh, she thinks. Oh. As if this poor man didn’t have enough problems already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> davantagedenuit has a masterful [coda](https://davantagedenuit.tumblr.com/post/185478605464/for-pottedmusic-and-her-valeryulana-but-just) to this, in which Shcherbina acts protective and not at all jealous of the scientists' camaraderie, no sir. Go read it now.


	3. Boris/Ulana after Valera’s suicide, angst cover to cover. Angst and anal fingering

Well, there’s a first for everything, she muses, and here’s just a random assortment, in no particular order: the first time a man cries, honest-to-God weeps while having sex with her; the first time her hand is knuckles deep up a man’s arse; the first time she’s naked and frisky with the vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers Boris Evdokimovich Shcherbina; she hopes none of these facts are causally connected.

It’s not that she wants him, not as such, not past her general curiosity about what people act like when you strip them down to their essential, inalienable, unprotected awkwardness: bits sagging and sticking out, bodies liking what they like, the stubborn bastards; and he sure as hell doesn’t want her; it’s just that the alternative is worse.

A phone call late at night: he manages to say the name, but then his voice breaks on the verb, impossible to get out, impossible to wrap his mind around, stuck in his throat like an ugly dead thing. Yes, she already knew: the institute driver who found him knew a lab technician who knew a grad student who knew a grad student from her institute, and so the news spread before anything got into the papers. Will she come visit? He’ll get her a ticket. Yes, of course, Borisevdokimych, no need to ask. (Her husband doesn’t ask any questions; her daughter throws a tantrum that she’ll miss her recital -again-, but she’ll think about that when she can think about something, anything but this.)

His driver picks her up at the train station. She lets out a soft whistle when she sees the house: hella weird to be reminded about their difference in status after being stuck in a foxhole together for so long.

She has to stand on tiptoe to hug him, and he feels brittle in his arms, a large awkward bird with empty bones.

They drink the first shot without clicking their glasses: to his memory. Then the second, then the third, when they should have been toasting love.

Boris Evdokimovich gets maudlin. He started drinking well before she arrived.

“He was a good man,” he says in that tone that means he’s looking for an excuse for a good cry. Last night, she cried so hard she gave herself dehydration, her head still pounds, so she will not stand by this.

She leans forward, grasps his cheeks and, looking him straight in the eye, says, “He was a stubborn, ambitious, driven, angry son of a bitch, and don’t you dare reduce him to your plaintive little sweet picture.”

Boris Evdokimovich hiccups. She takes it as a sign of agreement.

She leans back in her chair and stretches her legs, propping them up on the edge of his seat.

“Tell me about that time you believed you’ll have to send us both care packages to Lubyanka.”

“You know that one.”

“Tell me.”

He does.

“Tell me the one about the miners.”

He does. She didn’t know a man could weep while discussing 400 flaccid miners’ cocks, but he does; maybe he’s not even aware he’s crying, she realizes, big fat tears rolling down his cheeks like sweat. They say there’s nothing like the first love, when you don’t yet know that it will end; well, nothing beats the one you decide will be your last, and throw everything you had at it, and then some things you didn’t even know you had.

“Tell me how he interrupted Gorbachev.”

“Oh god, which time?”

She laughs till she cries.

“Well, to his memory.” No clinking their glasses this time either.

“He wouldn’t want us to sit here bawling our eyes out like two idiots,” she says when she can finally get a whole sentence out. Look at her, all grown up and in control of her emotions.

“No, he wouldn’t.”

After a pause, Boris Evdokimovich says, “You know what I regret? I didn’t talk to him after the trial. I hoped it would keep him safe. I hoped things would ease up eventually, and then-“

“Speaking of regrets,” she says, biting into a pickle, “I knew he’d taken a shine to you before you knew it. Maybe you’d have had more time if I told you. But then, maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” he agrees. “I’d have despised him for it if I knew before I was ready.”

“Awwwww, no need to despise anybody for liking you,” she says, and leans down to sloppily kiss him. She doesn’t think this through, but then, neither does he when he pulls her into his lap, his fingers digging angrily into her thighs, his legs bony under her.

He actually tries to carry her to the bedroom bridal style, if you can imagine that. She commends the effort, if not the way he almost drops her after a couple of steps, and leans down, and coughs, and coughs, and coughs. Drops of blood spatter the floor.

“Come on,” he says.

Several minutes of laboriously tugging at his cock later, he’s not hard yet.

“Let me.”

His soft cock feels vulnerable and exposed in her mouth. She’s good at this, if she says so herself. She’s been joking that that’s the only reason her husband married her (even if she’s a little bit offended that he never once contradicted her when she said that), but this one’s a no-go.

Wiping her mouth with the back of her palm, she pats him gently on the thigh.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

“I’m dying,” he says.

“Not in the next 15 minutes or so?” she asks in fake-horror. “Because I’m not explaining that to the KGB.”

He lets out a startled laugh. “No, not in the next 15 minutes.”

“Good.”

She licks her palm in an almost theatrical gesture, designed to show off, and reaches under his balls.

“He-” he starts saying, but cuts himself off. Starts crying again.

What was he like with him, she wonders. Behind closed doors. What were they both like.

He tenses when she rams two fingers in, shifts his hips a bit from side to side, reaches down to prod her wrist and correct the angle. She pulls her fingers out almost completely, then jabs them in again.

His cock plumps up nicely. Not at once, but soon enough. He’s breathing hard: with this, with the tears too. Is she hurting him? she wonders. Does he want not to be hurt?


	4. Valoris first time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I think this concludes the sad saga of the trio mix-and-match, or at least it concludes the plotline that doesn’t become a happy ot3. (Now I want a plotline where it does become a happy ot3, because I’ve made myself sad with all this angst.)
> 
>  
> 
> Valoris, first time, a shit ton of fucky attitudes to sexuality, period-typical homophobia, a really good argument for why Valera tops for all the bad reasons.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _What was he like with him, she wonders. Behind closed doors. What were they both like._ Breaking out of Ulana's POV for this purpose.

His vocabulary for this is limited to faggot, nance, poof, a noun for someone who was raped in prison, a verb for raping someone to destroy their status, it was never more than whispered rumours of shameful secrets on the very periphery of his world, but all that is distant, and this is naked laughing Valera in his arms, pale, feet cold as a frog, with golden freckles down his shoulders. Better him than Valera, he decides in the split second. His status can take it, he doesn’t envy the poor bugger who dares call him a poof, he can hit back with the best of them, whereas what is this timid scientist going to do, blush and shuffle out of the room? Yes, definitely better him than Valera.

"I want you to fuck me."

“Oh.”

Valera’s ears go red. He touches them reverently with the tips of his fingers, and then Valera’s kissing him, hungry and impatient and his, one hand tangled in his hair, another unscrewing the can of Vaseline.

Valera’s fingers are poky and squelchy in his arse. Feels odd, but odd he can deal with. Then Valera hits something that sends a jolt too intense to be altogether pleasurable through him, and doesn’t let go, pressing and rubbing until he shudders involuntarily, his thighs trembling, ashamed at the visceral reaction and eager for it not to stop. He clenches his muscles to keep those insistent fingers in place, and Valera lets out a soft laugh against the skin of his thigh, then withdraws.

There's only one moment of indecision, it's not that he's scared, he has been wounded in the war, he's buried family and friends, no, scared’s too strong a word, but still, he props himself up on his elbows and asks,

"Will it hurt very much."

Valera sits back on his haunches, tilts his head to the side like a worried dog.

"What the hell.” His movement makes the bed creak and sag when he lies down pressed against Boris’s side, puts an open palm over his heart. “What the hell, Boria. No it won't.”

Boris breathes in, then out around the lump in his throat, the nasty urgent jumble of anger and affection and fear for this impossible, indispensable, vulnerable man. What has he got himself into. How can he live with it. How can he live without.

Valera’s hands are on his cheeks, turning Boris to face him.

“Listen- If you have to listen to one thing I say, let it be this: if it hurts, tell me. I mean, listen to me when I say that we need an extra shipment of nitrogen, that too, but right now-"

He nods, swallows.

“We don’t need to do _this_. There are plenty of other things we can do.”

"Yes, but how else would I know that this is what-" What I am, he wants to say. "What I want."

Valera presses a kiss to his shoulder, chaste, open-mouthed, too hot in the humid summer heat. It burns like a brand.

"Boria, please appreciate that I’m doing my best to put this as tactfully as possible, but unless you somehow haven't noticed, we are in an abandoned apartment we found specifically for this purpose, naked in one bed, and your cock didn’t seem to mind it one bit when it was in my mouth. There's a can of Vaseline that you bought on the bedstand. If you don’t want this, there are very few reasonable explanations for this arrangement.”

Boris tries to smooth out the firm line between Valera’s brows with his thumb, but it reemerges the moment he lets go. With a sigh, he says,

“But I love you.”

“Oh.”

"So I want you to fuck me," he repeats stubbornly. “I assume you know what you are doing.”

“Yes, I know what I’m doing.” Valera shifts back to between his legs. “Not like I hold a doctorate in it, but yes.”

At that, thankfully, Valera gives up and stops asking. It does hurt a bit, if not as much as he expected; he doesn't tell, and then it doesn’t hurt anymore. Orgasm catches him by surprise, wrenching him apart, like a hook lodged in a pike’s throat. Not proof conclusive, but close enough.

Afterwards, curled against him, a leg thrown over his hips, Valera asks without looking at him.

"No, call me stupid, but I still don’t understand. You thought it would hurt not inconsiderably, and you still would have done it. Why?"

For someone so smart, Valera can be surprisingly daft, but Boris is getting used to that, like he’s getting used to many other things about him. He already sees how this will shake out, see. Sooner or later, Valera says one wrong thing too many, to one wrong person too many, barges in where he shouldn’t, and there’s only so much Boris can do. Best-case scenario, their project here ends quietly, and they go their separate ways, Valera to his lofty ideas that just might change the world, and Boris to his paper-pushing. There's no way this will not hurt, and hurt significantly more than a passing burn and stretch, so why make a hassle about it?


	5. coda: 3 things they never told one another

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so these are the snippets that I initially deemed too angsty even for this angsty 'verse, but then I needed some stress relief, so they did end up on my tumblr, and then I decided to dump them here for safekeeping, so proceed at your own risk. Angst, angst, angst, with an angsty cherry on top.
> 
> Snippet 1 is chapter 4 (aka Valoris first time) from Valera’s POV, snippet 2 is set right after chapter 4, and Ulana’s snippet is set in the time skip between the two parts of chapter 1.

Eventually they do find an apartment left unlocked. Neat rows of winter shoes that will never come in useful on the shelves in the corridor, a cheap set of china on proud display in the china cupboard: not a status symbol as much as a tentative promise of better things to come, better sets of china, to be carefully procured for a better class of guests; none of that will happen, at least not in this place. That’s all Valera manages to see before Boris, suddenly timid, takes his hand and whispers, not to be overheard by the ghosts of people who had lived here, “Come to bed.”

They find fresh bed sheets in the linen closet (scratchy with repeated washing, but clean) and remake the bed, shaking out the last remnants of the smells and dreams of the people who lived here. After a moment’s hesitation, Valera carefully folds the dirty sheets, paying his last respects to the woman who had taken loving care of this modest apartment.

They undress, keeping their distance for modesty’s sake; Boris even turns away when pulling down his pants, but then puts a can of Vaseline on the bed stand with an unnecessary thud: a statement, a needless warning.

“Come here,” Valera says, crossing the distance between them, and, placing his palms on Boris’s hips, pulls their bodies flush.

Boris freezes in his arms; at least his cock seems interested. Valera amends his earlier assumption that Boris has had little experience with men to no experience with men at all, and briefly regrets the decisions that led them here. If the man has lived his life without, what’s the point in complicating everything now, when they have so little time left, and the stakes are so high, and all for what, to scratch a passing itch, to entertain a fleeting fancy? Speaking of fleeting fancies, he had long dreamed of sucking Boris’s cock, and does, one hand cradling his balls, the other squeezing Boris’s palm to soothe him, to keep him grounded. The man does have a gorgeous cock, so at least there’s that.

Insofar as Valera dared to assume anything, he assumed Boris would fuck him; then, seeing him scared, assumed that they will take things slow. He can barely believe his ears when Boris says, “I want you to fuck me.”

Which is fine, he has always had inordinate amounts of respect for the kids who dove in at the deep end of the pool (he himself waded in cautiously and never crossed the line where the floor plunged down stiffly). And, after all, who is he to persuade a man who can ride a bus for free with a senior citizen’s card what does and doesn’t belong up his ass? And then everything goes very wrong.

“Will it hurt very much?” Boris asks, like he’s doing some kind of penance. Valera has had little interest in penance when he was a student, and by now, one leg already in the grave, he has none. Boris, being Boris, doesn’t stop at half-measures though. Before Valera has a chance to talk him out of the whole idea or at least to talk him back from a panic attack, Boris blurts out, “But I love you.”

Valera almost chokes on the horrible, gutting pity. Here’s this big, loud, brash man, suddenly so vulnerable. Valera almost clambers out of bed there and then. He could tell Boris, he guesses, that they cannot afford to be so serious about that, but what’s the point of it, really.

***

So, there was this guy in Boris's unit, back during the Winter War, right? In charge of provisions, making sure they were fed and clothed, keeping track of their equipment, making sure nobody would be stuck without the essentials. More crucial to their survival on the day-to-day basis, that is, than any general in his distant headquarters, and more benevolent than any God they didn’t believe in but secretly prayed to when the shelling was bad, their fussy granny and stern schoolteacher scolding a pupil for a torn book satchel all rolled into one middle-aged Kazakh with a missing front tooth; everybody knew he was bent, but they were never truly malicious when they joked about it, y’know?

When some jerk writes an anonymous denunciation and the man is quietly removed from their unit, they all grumble and curse and complain under their breath. He was a good man, that’s all that mattered. Boris grumbles and curses too, because it wouldn’t do to stick out and advertise the fact that it was he who wrote that anonymous report. And if Boris got his job afterwards, that was just a lucky coincidence. First and foremost, Boris was proud of cleansing their unit of this alien element, because there’s no knowing what such people might do. There’s no knowing indeed.

He thinks about it with Valera asleep in his arms. How did they know that that man, whose name he doesn’t even remember anymore, was a fag? Maybe someone saw something. Or maybe someone joked that you’ll need to suck him off to get an extra chocolate. What happened to him afterwards?

Valera tosses in his sleep, as if the anxieties haunting their waking hours had managed to slink into his dreams. Boris holds him close, cradling his head like he would a baby, to make sure that he doesn’t wake himself; then cautiously presses his lips to the crown of his head. They have maybe a half hour before their absence becomes reason for concerns. He briefly considers telling Valera about that man and about his denunciation, but knows that Valera cannot grant him absolution, so what’s the point of it, really.

***

The doctor is gray, plump, homely, with a web of varicose veins on her feet; Ulana mentally describes her as matronly, only to realize that she herself is probably a couple years older than her.

“Ever since Chernobyl, abortions is all we do. I miss prenatal care. Fuck, I miss yeast infections.” She swears matter-of-factly, the way, one assumes, nurses did during the war. Ulana knows the area: she was born in a village 30 kilometers to the east. The war ran through this town several times, and there are probably still mass graves sleeping undug around it. Generations of scared mothers gave birth to scared children in between burials and execution sites. "These girls sometimes ask if they’ll have children later. What do I tell them? Chernobyl’s the end. There will be no more children.“

The woman starts crying. Ulana wants to shake her, but grits her teeth instead, squeezes her hand so firmly it probably hurts.

"There will be children. We’ll deal with that madness. Hey, look at me. Look at me. I can promise you that.”

Parenthetically, Ulana’s also there to get an abortion. Between the radiation, the drinking, her age which makes the pregnancy vaguely obscene, and the fact that she hasn’t slept with her husband since ‘83 and is in no particular hurry to fake immaculate conception, nothing else makes sense. 

She had one when she was still a student, before she met her husband, but she doesn’t remember you were supposed to shave. The scratch of the dull hospital-issue razor makes her consider feeling sorry for herself—that’s an awful lot of fuss for some very brief fumbling, after all—but it’s not like anybody will notice her bare crotch (by then she already knows Valera was a one-off thing, and whether she’ll ever sleep with her husband again is a matter of mild curiosity at best).

The matronly doctor is very gentle with her. Put your legs here, baby girl. Breathe, little fish.

She briefly considers telling Valera about it (afterwards, obviously, not before: no need to complicate the matters further), but what’s the point of it, really.


	6. Boris and Ulana ushering in the New Year '89

Ulana brings a large pan of olivier salad. Boris brings a funeral portrait: a large black-and-white picture, a black ribbon across the corner, and all. Legasov in the portrait is eyeing them skeptically, a brow quirked, as if asking, is this really the best you could do?

“Don’t even start,” Ulana says, peeling off the black ribbon.

(After six hours in the trunk, the salad smells faintly of gasoline. It’s the largest pan she owns, the one she also uses to boil clothes with recalcitrant blots and streaks. It’s not that she’s cooking specifically for three, it’s that she only ever cooks when guests are coming, so she’s not used to cooking for small groups.)

They meet in Slavutych, the new city built to host refugees from Pripyat and the crew of the remaining reactors of the Chernobyl Power Plant. Wide streets, smart modern planning, no old blood, no old ghosts.

“I wonder if this is my last New Year,” Boris says.

Ulana rolls her eyes. “You always wonder if this is your last this or your last that. Do you do that on the toilet too? D’you ever wonder if it’s the last time you are taking a shit?”

He looks briefly like he might hit her, which is still better than his usual maudlin. Instead he pulls her into a hug, covers the back of her head with one big palm, presses a dry-lipped kiss to the crown of her head. She didn’t notice when they became so casual with the touching, and it chills her. She used to believe that, when the time came, Boris would be merely an absence in her life, not an urgent loss, but her math might have been off.

Against the skin of her scalp, he says, “I know that you, too, are scared. I know that you, too, are grieving. No need to be crude.”

When he speaks, she can hear dark rivers of blood gurgle and murmur over invisible landscapes in his chest.

It’s not like the portrait is all Boris had brought: he also brought tangerines and a small can of caviar, but when he tries to open in, a can opener slips in his shaking hands.

“Give it to me,” Ulana barks. She expects him to protest, to keep poking at the can until the lid turns into a moon landscape, and all that just to affirm his reputation as the big strong man, but he obeys without a word, like a child. She makes quick work of it.

Not one of them thought to bring bread or butter, so they eat the caviar with a spoon, decadence cancelled out by the pragmatism of the decision.

“Eat up, Ulanochka. It’s good for your anemia,” he says, as if she was his daughter or maybe granddaughter, not a woman he could desire. So he has access to her medical files. 

He keeps track of time on his wristwatch, but between the caviar and opening the champagne, they miss New Year (Moscow time) by a couple of minutes.

“Farewell,” Boris says, raising his flute of champagne, “to the last year that still had him in it.”

“Don’t even start,” she repeats. “It’s been over for hours in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.”

He raises a very sober gaze at her. “You hated him, didn’t you.”

“Sometimes.” (In reality, often, but that has long ceased to matter.) “Didn’t you?”

He laughs, his eyes flying open in surprise, as if the laughter was a coin a magician pulled out of his throat; then coughs, then croaks, “Sometimes.”

Which still doesn’t explain it. “Boris, why did you invite me here?”

His eyes are clear, as if they haven’t been drinking, as if he was already looking at her from the other side, where it’s always cold.

“If it’s my last New Year, that’s one person less who would remember him this time next year, and then there will be nobody to remember him at all.”

She forces a laugh, because no way she’s leaving “we will all die, and be forgotten” as the last toast of the evening; punches him in the shoulder playfully.

“There’s also Kyiv and Minsk time. The year’s not yet over everywhere,” she says, covering his folded palms with hers. “We can keep celebrating.”

“Yes, but I’m very tired, and I want to sleep.”

They undress quietly. She pauses hesitantly in her underwear, but he hands her the nightgown without a hitch. They lie down between time zones, the old year already over, the new one not yet begun. She pulls the blanket over their heads, as if, in that hot sweaty darkness, they could hide from time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes:
> 
> * [olivier salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad): a customary New Year salad in Soviet and post-Soviet countries. it’s not usually as fancy as wikipedia might lead you to believe.
> 
> * [Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) is a city in the far east of Russia; its time zone is 9 hours ahead of Moscow.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [coda to combinatorics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165489) by [More_night](https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night)




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